As would be obvious to one of skill in the art, there are a number of situations and/or processes for which it would be desirable to extract a sample of a material from a vessel in which the material is contained. Such extraction would generally be desirable for purposes of examination or testing, but could be performed for other reasons, as well.
With respect to process monitoring, such sample extraction may be desirable in a number of processes, including without limitation, parallel synthesis (combinatorial chemistry) applications, organic synthesis, chemical process development, and the scale-up of laboratory processes into production. A number of other such applications wherein sample extraction would be of interest also exist and would be known to those of skill in the art.
Known sampling devices may be operated by hand, or may employ a vacuum-based device mounted remotely or in a vessel containing a material of interest, or a by-pass port or similar mechanism through which amount of a material of interest can be siphoned. In any case, however, known methods generally require that an extracted sample be removed from the vessel and then transferred to another container before the sample can be quenched or similarly operated upon.
Known manual sample capture and analysis methods commonly suffer from a lack of precision with regard to the timing of sample capture and subsequent sample processing. Further, sample capture methods can only be used to take samples that are at atmospheric pressure. Reactions that take place under pressure cannot be sampled by these techniques. A sample capture method that makes use of a by-pass type of sampling device, where the reaction flows through a loop to a point where it can be sampled, can be used to sample reactions under pressure—however, a large reaction volume is required to use such a device.
Importantly, known sample capture methods also do not permit sample processing (mixing, quenching, dilution, etc.), to take place substantially contemporaneously with sample capture but, rather, require that a sample be first transferred to another vessel. Consequently, the state of a given sample may actually change from the time of sample extraction to the time of quenching, etc.
Therefore, based on these foregoing issues with known sampling methods, it should be apparent that a method for capturing a material sample and for processing the material sample in situ and substantially contemporaneously with sample capture would be desirable. A sample capture device and method of the present invention allows for such a process.